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How do I figure out an individual Twitter status URL?

I have been using Twhirl as my Twitter client and am pretty happy with it, but I'm baffled by one thing: recently someone sent me an email that included a URL on Twitter that took me to a page that had just a single tweet on it. How did they do that?


Dave's Answer:

A little known feature of Twitter is that each and every "tweet", or message sent on the system, has a unique identifying number and that if you know that number, you can actually construct a URL that shows just that one message on the page.

The URLs look like this:

http://twitter.com/FilmBuzz/statuses/862509661

The Twitter account in question is FilmBuzz and the unique status update ID is 862509661.

But how did I figure that number out? Turns out that it's the time stamp on a Twitter message that links to the unique URL for that tweet, so in Twhirl, I clicked on the following:

twhirl twitter filmbuzz timestamp

As you can see, I'm going to click on the timestamp that says "about 7h ago", at which point Twhirl hands the URL to my Web browser, Flock, and I see:

twitter tweet page filmbuzz

The URL of that page tells me what I want to know, and I can now easily copy and paste that URL onto a Web page (like this!) or into an email message to some Beatles fans I know (or, perhaps, someone who is an Emerson, Lake and Palmer fan, one or the other).

Hope that helps. It certainly isn't an intuitive path to get the answer!


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Reader Comments To Date: 10

Rob McNealy said, on July 19, 2008 9:03 PM:

Thanks Dave. I was wondering how to do that. How do you come up with these great questions all the time?

Sam Stone said, on April 16, 2009 1:22 AM:

Good post. This has to be one the most unclear features on Twitter.

This works from TweetDeck too. Just doubleclick the time-stamp to open the page in your browser.

Claire said, on May 23, 2009 3:14 PM:

Thanks so much! I couldn't even find the answer in the Twitter help section!

Ali said, on October 17, 2009 2:03 PM:

Thank you!! I was wondering how to figure that out... actually thought it would be more difficult, ha

Carter Cole said, on January 24, 2010 7:58 PM:

pictures are fine but its allot better to put the tweet directly into the page and make it so users can interact and reply to it

eighty said, on February 9, 2010 1:15 PM:

awesome. thanks

Kamal Patel said, on September 23, 2010 11:49 AM:

hey buddy ...thanks for the nice helpful info

lee said, on December 18, 2010 6:18 AM:

Thanks for this one! :) Super helpful!

Gelan said, on May 11, 2011 12:15 AM:

Great! thank you so much!

Da Code said, on January 11, 2012 12:37 AM:

Thanks Dave,

this Twitter statuses blogpost is still helpfull in 2012 as it is still accurate !

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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